Douglas N. Harris is the director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans and a Professor of Economics and the University Endowed Chair in Public Education at Tulane University. He is on twitter at @Era_NOLA.

By Douglas Harris December 13, 2016 at 10:56 AM

My recent New York Times op-ed and a longer version of the piece that appeared in Education Next seem to have sparked a raucous debate over DeVos and her ideas. I'm glad for that much. We need a rich debate on these important issues, and that's why I'm taking the unusual step of a third round of comment.

By Douglas Harris September 12, 2016 at 9:43 AM

Perhaps the most under-analyzed piece of the charter movement is the charter authorizer. Headlines about charters generally focus either on the schools themselves or on their charter management organizations, but this misses the fact that someone--the authorizer--is deciding which of these schools are even allowed to exist. It is the ultimate choice: which schools are allowed to open and which are forced to close? How and how well do government-approved authorizers make these decisions?

By Douglas Harris August 25, 2016 at 8:30 AM

In light of recent events, I am taking a brief break from my usual focus on urban education research and policy to discuss events in Baton Rouge that are relevant to schooling but have broader significance.

By Douglas Harris August 3, 2016 at 7:22 AM

After commenting on the Democratic platform on education, I'm turning to the Republican side. While the tensions are clearly more intense on the Democratic side (hardly surprising after 8 years with a Democratic president), the Republicans are threading their own needles.

By Douglas Harris July 25, 2016 at 10:57 AM

It's convention time for both the Democratic and Republican parties, and I'll take turns discussing their education platforms, which are a useful windows into the current status of political debates and harbingers of compromises to come. I'll start with Democrats.

By Douglas Harris July 11, 2016 at 6:30 AM

The idea that school reform, especially test-based accountability is driving teachers out of the profession has been widely reported in the media. When we actually look at the data, there is evidence of problems in the teacher pipeline to be sure, but not an overall teacher shortage.

By Douglas Harris June 9, 2016 at 10:30 AM

The coming partial return of charter schools from the state to the Orleans Parish School Board, which I described in a prior post, raises interesting questions about the role of local democratic control of schools. My argument here is that the governance of charter schools, and especially an almost-all-charter system like New Orleans, has to be less democratic than traditional school districts.

By Douglas Harris May 25, 2016 at 9:40 AM

I've noticed that one topic in school reform debates gets much less attention than it deserves: student mobility. This is a key metric because it reflects both the hopes and the fears of proponents of choice and market-based reforms.

By Douglas Harris April 28, 2016 at 9:50 AM

New Orleans was the first city in the country to move to an almost-all-charter school system, but that system has been governed mostly by the state. Now, the city seems poised for another first: to become the first almost-all-charter district governed by a traditional, locally elected school board.